Travelogue, Part One

Back in June, when I had just completed an important project at work and it looked like COVID-19 might be easing off for good, I planned and booked a trip to Italy. I write to you from Italy now — specifically, from a small village about an hour’s drive from Rome.

One of the oddities of modern life is that we now associate vacations both with travel and with rest, even when one precludes the other. We all know the indignities of air travel, but then there’s the recreation itself — for outdoor enthusiasts, the hiking and climbing and tenting in sometimes punishing weather; for the city-goers (myself among them), the tromping through museums and inhospitable city streets. The kind of vacation where you really do rest, the kind that involves lying down somewhere with a comfortable climate and water for dipping in and cold beverages at hand, is not popular among my friends (and has an air of being a bit boring and philistine). Perhaps it will become more popular as we all age.

Vacations have a way of calling your bluff. The things you say you want to do, the things you claim you’d be doing if you didn’t have 8:30 zoom meetings or dogs to walk or buses to catch, if you didn’t have to cook dinners or sweep floors or take children to softball games — vacation is the time to see if you’ll do them, and find out whether you feel better or not. My own version of this is the hope that without the job and the other daily stresses, I’ll be able to hear myself think a little more, notice space opening up in my brain, feel more like my best self.

The COVID-19 situation

Two weeks or so ago, when the EU issued revised guidance to its member countries advising a ban on non-essential travel from the USA, I was worried I’d have to cancel. Fortunately for me, Italy did not increase its level of restrictiveness beyond requiring a test for vaccinated travelers as well as unvaccinated ones, on top of the already existing requirement that everyone fill out a Passenger Locator Form. The airline checked my test results and glanced at my vaccine card before I boarded in Seattle, and inquired about my locator form but did not ask me to show it. On landing in Rome there were no checks at all — no one asked about my vaccination status or requested any documents. My passport was stamped without a word.

Orvieto

The first day and night of my trip was spent in Orvieto, a small-ish city roughly equidistant between Florence and Rome. My Lonely Planet guide tells me that its placement has made the town rather overrated — that its convenience for tour operators leads them to overstate its charms. It describes Orvieto as lacking in charm: “This is partly to do with the gloominess of the dark volcanic rock from which Orvieto is built, and, more poetically, because it harbors something of the characteristic brooding atmosphere of Etruscan towns.” Of its famous Duomo, it writes that it was “miraculous” it got built at all: “medieval Orvieto was so violent that at times the population thought about giving up on it altogether. Dante wrote that its family feuds were worse than those between Verona’s Montagues and Capulets.”

I was feeling a bit beaten-down on my way from the airport in Rome into Orvieto. I was worried that all the hopes I’d nurtured for this trip — that it would be restful and affirming and mind-opening — wouldn’t come to pass, that I’d be just as moody and numb as back home, that the isolation of solo travel would get to me and that I’d waste my time dicking around on the internet the same way I do at home. It didn’t help that I’d started my next dose of Proust (one volume of recherche per year, this year being the fifth), with all its ruminating on how often the experience of something pales in comparison to the anticipatory imagining of it.

But I needn’t have worried — this brooding town was perfect. As soon as I stepped inside the Duomo, I knew it wasn’t a mistake to come. My eyes hadn’t rested on anything quite that beautiful since before the pandemic; at least not anything man-made. There was the quietness of the cathedral — there were only scattered tourists — and the evidence of centuries of engineering and artistry and ingenuity dedicated to building something that could help people believe in a reason for being alive. It’s easy to be cynical about cathedrals, to see them as symbols of the power of an oppressive church. But I’m grateful that this one, lavish in its stripes and tracery and golds and blues, survived through the centuries for me to see it and, in seeing it, feel gladdened.

As a coda, that evening I ate a spectacular meal in a restaurant that happened to have some ancient Etruscan ruins in the basement, in a network of passages branching off from the wine cellar. It was quiet and beautiful there too.

Speaking like a child

I mentioned in previous newsletters that upon booking the trip, I resolved to learn as much Italian as possible before going. I mostly used the Fluent Forever method, and it requires a lot more creative DIY than buying a pack of flash cards or using an app that puts you on a well-defined program, like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo. In spite of this — and likely because of it — I have been finding it much more fun. It places a heavy emphasis on acquiring vocabulary through pictures (chosen yourself) and a spaced repetition algorithm, and this latter works particularly well to avoid the sense of failure, drudgery, and knowledge slipping away that, say, Duolingo can engender. I felt like I was continuously making progress, that it wasn’t a big deal if I forgot a word or got something wrong because, hey, I’ll get it next time, and with enough repetition at the right times even the trickiest words can be remembered.

The past few days I’ve been putting my new knowledge to the test. Most of the people I speak with switch to English when it becomes clear how bad my Italian is, but I’ve never had to do the dreadful tourist thing of opening an interaction by asking if we could speak in English, or worse, speaking English to begin with and hoping to be understood, or gesturing and grunting without saying anything at all.

Childhood is when we typically learn languages, and learning how to speak a new one as an adult means that, for a time, you sound like a child. I’m sure I sound something like a two-year-old babbling with whatever words I know and messing up my verb endings, but I also find myself mentally doing things like pointing at something and saying the word like a kid on the street pointing out a doggie! to his mother. I’ve had to hold back from saying entirely inane sentences just to show that I know how (“I hear the pretty music” “Where is the owl?”). But, also like a child, I’m finding great pleasure in it. Even when it’s embarrassing, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as deploying newly acquired knowledge. I can at least take comfort in the feeling that however rudimentary it is, I probably have better Italian than the vast majority of American tourists in Italy.

Retreating

This next week I’m spending in a small village in a personal attempt at a “writing retreat.” I’m in an eccentrically laid out house carved into a hillside cave, which sports many, many stairs, terraces with beautiful views, and an impressive variety of noisy flying insects. The aim is to spend the upcoming week in solitary writing, reading, eating, and walking. It feels like a luxury, and it is. Whether my thinking will be improved by the solitude remains to be seen, but I can always hope.